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THE SUN SETS

…for a brilliant woman. The death of Grace Paley is a surprise and a loss. I took an American Literature class, along with Rhett, from the award-winning writer Michael Trussler awhile back, and while a portion of our reading was poetry (Jorie Graham and Richard Howard) one book of short stories was Paley’s Enormous Changes at the Last Minute in our reading list. I’d say the changes in my thinking, and I’m sure Rhett’s, were enormous, extreme even. It’s sad that she had to leave us, and on my birthday of all days, but it’s good that we’ll have her in print, around to poke us in our writing (for those now addicted to FB) for years to come.

I have to admit that the obit in the Globe and Mail the other day piqued my interest… I don’t know the American canon… I was particularly interested in the statement that “her work was about what happened to the women that the male characters of Philip Roth, Saul Bellow and Bernard Malamud’s had loved and left behind”.

Hmm, Suzanne, this may require some more time, and perhaps a more indepth post on GP. She was the kind of writer that grabbed you by the balls and squeezed for as long as she had you. And she had you usually in the first paragraph.

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“Take warning from all those times when on meeting again, we feel ashamed because we realize we had accepted the false simplification which absence permits, its obliteration of all those characteristics which, when we meet face to face, force themselves upon even the blindest. Where human beings are concerned, the statement ‘nothing is true’ is true—at a distance—and the converse is also true—at the moment of confrontation” --Dag Hammarskjold.